Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even if you have no interest and don't have a business (perhaps you don't even know what that is), for those who have email, you have experienced the nastier side. You've probably seen the ads for email address lists that provide thousands-or even millions-of email addresses for pocket change. Did you ever wonder how anyone could come up with all these addresses?
You can be sure of one thing: if the price is not expensive, these are not opt-in lists. Instead, these tremendous lists are loaded with “collected” email addresses. They are equal to some list of street addresses chosen from your phone book.
Largely, the addresses are harvested from web logs, membership or pupil lists, newsgroups, message boards, forums, along with other locations where folks gather to swap information. They do not know their addresses are being gathered up and sold on the open market. And they definitely did not ask to have their inboxes polluted with junk.
Harvesting email addresses is legal. But it's widely considered unethical. You will not go to jail or pay a fine. However, you could hurt your business, perhaps irreparably. The potential effects for violating the unwritten rule about no email harvesting range from losing your ISP to having your company blacklisted to losing your domain name.